Sport never stands still. Whatever our context or chosen discipline, what constitutes a winning strategy is continually evolving. Trends emerge and endure through a process of natural selection. Conventions in coaching and the prevailing wisdom on ‘best practice’ similarly morph over time, albeit other influences are also often at play. Remaining at the cutting edge relies upon our ability to adapt faster than the opposition. Within our environment the challenge is to evolve what we do and how we do it to preserve a competitive advantage. Being attuned and responsive to the constantly shifting dynamics can allow us to adapt to new challenges, respond to emerging threats from rivals and accommodate unforeseen events that change the rules of the game.
WE MUST EVOLVE TO COMPETE (AND SURVIVE)…
Elite sport is a good example of survival of the fittest. Here we define fitness in evolutionary terms: the ability to out-compete and endure under survival pressures. Developments in coaching practices, tactical strategies and technical aspects likewise each occur through a process of evolution.
“Some solutions are ‘fitter’ than others. The fittest survive and propagate. The unfit die.”
Periodically changes in the eco-system within the sport create the conditions for a dramatic paradigm shift that proves to be game-changing. A good example was the Fosbury flop in high jump; and whilst this new technique shattered existing conventions at the time, the conditions that allowed for it were created with the advent of foam matting becoming customarily used in the high jump pit.
“The definition of a bad strategy is to try to do the same as everybody else and just assume that you’re going to win anyway...
...this is the great conceit: that we don’t have to do anything unique or different and we’ll have unique success”
Extraordinary results do not come from doing the same things in the same way as the opposition. It is also often said that necessity is the mother of invention. Legend has it this was part of the origin story of the Fosbury flop - the originator Dick Fosbury struggled with the established techniques and this originally prompted him to experiment. Necessity is certainly a driver for evolution in competitive sport. Pioneering new tactics typically come from the underdogs who must find a way to compete with their more favoured rivals.
There is of course great first mover advantage in being the first (or at least among the first). Whilst the periodic seismic shifts that prove to be game-changing do not occur very often, they can prove terminal for those who fail to respond and adapt in a timely fashion. To put this in sharper context, the necessity also comes from a more existential threat - adapt or die.
10,000 ITERATIONS…
Whilst the Fosbury flop technique seemed revolutionary at the time, this pioneering new technical model for the event occurred through a process of evolution. The final technique for the Fosbury flop was developed and refined through an exhaustive process of trial and error, such that it morphed a great deal over time from the early attempts.
Beyond necessity, it is important to realise that each invention or innovation is the mother of the next. Evolution is an incremental process. Variations on tried and tested themes provide the next generation of solutions so that progress occurs through successive iterations and different innovations along the way. Viable ideas recombine to create novel hybrid solutions.
Each evolution opens up the next frontier of possibilities; this is described as the adjacent possible. In other words, there is path dependence to how solutions emerge and evolve. Each domino in the sequence plays an integral part in each intermediate step that leads to progress. This means there are no hacks or shortcuts. We can certainly take a different path - but we still require each stepping stone to progress.
THE COURAGE TO EXPERIMENT…
“Trial and error is a tremendously powerful process for solving problems in a complex world”
Evolution is by its nature a process of trial and error. It does not follow any plan. Viable solutions emerge over the course of trials and tweaks - and each success opens up new possibilities and potential applications that were not planned or anticipated at the outset. All of this points to the fact that we need to be ready to try things and see where it takes us.
Beyond being willing to try, we also need to be ready to commit to the process. The prototype of any pioneering solution is imperfect and initial attempts typically fail. Not only must we have the courage to experiment in the first instance but also the willingness to persevere and tinker with the solution rather than giving up if we do not strike gold immediately.
The courage to stand alone and do things differently is crucial. Ironically it is also typically not incentivised! There is a lack of job security in professional sport especially and a common survival strategy is to do the things that are expected of us (i.e. what everybody else is doing).
CREATING THE CONDITIONS…
The pace of evolution varies according to the conditions within a particular eco-system. The different evolutionary pressures and the availability of energy to invest in the process are two major factors that determine the overall rate of change as well as the diversity we see. Within our own environment we should therefore be mindful of the survival pressures and incentives at play and ensure we invest the requisite time and energy to fuel the process.
Another prerequisite for evolution is trade or exchange. Much of evolution occurs through combining and recombining what exists already to create new permutations and variations. It follows that the conditions must allow for the necessary cross-pollination via interaction with others. Beyond opening up channels for exchange of ideas within our sport, domain or discipline, we can derive a great deal of advantage in exploring further afield and interacting with those in other domains. The perspectives from other domains can even provide advance clues that enable us to anticipate development and shifts in our chosen sport or discipline.
We should however make the important distinction from chasing fads. The reason that fads occur is due to other influences (such as marketing and the desire for manufacturers and distributors to sell product). Fads spread through peer-influence and the pressure to conform (or in other words peer-contagion and the ability for host bodies to resist the spread). The reasons that they die out is that they do not provide a true competitive advantage in reality.
In addition to exchange, evolution requires real-life conditions in order for the process of natural selection (survival of the fittest) to occur. Professional sport is often not conducive to free exchange of ideas, but it certainly has regular exposure to reality. Academia is the opposite: free exchange of ideas in abundance, but these ideas are not routinely exposed to real-life conditions. As an aside, one reason that ‘theories’ can persist in academia for so long is that they escape being exposed in the harsh light of reality. My friend and colleague in the field John Kiely has dubbed this phenomenon as ‘zombie ideas’ - they never seem to die.
DEALING WITH IMPEDIMENTS…
There are also forces that resist change and slow the pace of evolution within any environment. We derive a survival advantage when we are able to recognise and start to address these internal and external actors. Removing or mitigating the impediments goes a long way to ensure that the evolution of practice within our particular performance environment occurs at a faster rate than our opposition.
The major impediments to evolving practice within our environment often amount to three ‘C’s: conservatism, conventions and the urge to conform.
There is always inertia and a degree of conservatism. A common reason why individuals are reluctant to try things and resistant to change is fear. The leadership has a big role to play here and we can certainly help overcome the natural risk aversion by explicitly giving staff the permission to try things. We might even go so far as to take the lead of Reed Hastings (of Netflix fame) and communicate to the staff that they will be fired for not taking risks. Of course this does mean accepting that things will go awry from time to time. Once we understand that trial and error is the central mechanism for evolution to occur this also means recognising that errors are integral to the feedback loop that informs learning and progress.
Conventions are there to be challenged and the prevailing consensus views regarding practice should be interrogated on a regular basis. If there is wisdom in the particular convention it should withstand this scrutiny. Undertaking a periodic audit of our assumptions and drilling down to first principles is certainly a useful exercise in critical thinking.
The urge to conform is not only a barrier to doing things differently to the opposition but following the herd can also take us off on detours and down dead-ends that distract or even detract from the mission. There is certainly an element of social contagion in the trends and fads that spread like wildfire through professional sport at regular intervals. Returning to the domino analogy, once a prominent team is reported to be adopting a certain technology or methodology, too often the other teams in the league follow suit. Certainly there is advantage to be had in spotting when our rivals are chasing fool’s gold.
There are also potential sources of active resistance that impede progress so that evolution slows to a crawl (it rarely stops entirely). Inevitably the established order creates vested interests and this means there will be those who are motivated to ensure things stay as they are out of self-interest. On occasion what obstructs implementing fixes to solve glaring issues is that there are those who presently profit from the dysfunction. The resistance to embrace solutions can stem from a reluctance to give up the fringe benefits that they derive from the problems that exist. Such a scenario presents a more recalcitrant problem that is accordingly likely to require a more decisive response.
POST SCRIPT: For those who are interested in this topic I heartily recommend Matt Ridley’s excellent book The Evolution of Everything.
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